George Biddle

George Biddle studied at Harvard Law School, Académie Julian and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Work by George Biddle is recorded in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Mexico Museum of Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum. Distinctions recorded are Rome Prize.

• Name — George Biddle • Born — January 24, 1885 • Died — November 6, 1973 • Known for — Federal Art Project • Movement — social realism

Born to an established Philadelphia family, Biddle attended the elite Groton School (where he was a classmate of Franklin D. Roosevelt). He completed his undergraduate studies and later earned a law degree from Harvard (1908 and 1911, respectively). He passed his bar examination in Philadelphia. Biddle's legal career was short-lived, however, and by the end of 1911 he had left the United States to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. In the next two years he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Returning to Europe in 1914, Biddle spent time in Munich and Madrid, studying printmaking in the Spanish capital, before trying his hand at impressionism in France. As he remembered, "I gobbled up museums, French Impressionism, cubism, futurism, and the old masters; I copied Velasquez in Madrid and Rubens in Munich…." In 1917, with the United States' entry into the First World War, Biddle enlisted in the army. In the early interwar period Biddle continued his studies in far-flung locations such as Tahiti, returned to France in 1924, and in 1928 went on a sketching trip through Mexico with Diego Rivera.

Prior to his Mexican travels, Biddle had returned to the United States in 1927 and established a printing shop in New York, where he "began to explore the variety and richness of technique and expressionism possible in lithography", a medium which he hoped would "popularize American art by making it better known to the American public". He was a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists. In the 1930s, Biddle became a champion of social art and strongly advocated government funding for artistic endeavors. His correspondence with his former classmate (and recently elected president) Franklin Roosevelt contributed to the establishment of the Federal Art Project, an arm of the Works Progress Administration that produced several hundred thousand pieces of publicly funded art. Biddle himself completed a mural titled The Tenement for the Justice Department building in Washington, D.C., and made sketches of the opera Porgy and Bess during its late 1930s tour. His works were exhibited at the 1939 New York World's Fair. During these years Biddle also wrote several books and taught at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Biddle was hired in 1940, along with eight other prominent American artists, to document dramatic scenes and characters during the production of the film The Long Voyage Home, a cinematic adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's plays. He served as president of the National Society of Mural Painters from 1935 to 1936. During World War II, Biddle was appointed chairman of the United States Department of War's Art Advisory Committee and served to recruit artists to that body. Biddle himself traveled through Algeria, Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy with the 3rd Infantry Division and produced works documenting that unit's activities. He wrote a book on his war travels: Artist at War Tunisia-Sicily-Italy, Viking Press, 1944. When the Art Advisory Committee was disbanded, he produced combat art for Life magazine. Towards the end of World War II, between 1943-1944, Biddle and his wife, Hélène Sardeau, were commissioned to design and paint a mural for the Supreme Court of Mexico. The mural, War and Peace, was completed in 1945. Coincidentally, Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa who was studying in Mexico in 1945 and was given to opportunity learned how to apply wet plaster for this particular mural. In 1950, Biddle was appointed to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, serving until 1951 and again from 1953 to 1955.

George Biddle's brother was Francis Biddle (1886–1968), who was Attorney General of the United States. During Francis' tenure as the Attorney General, the new Department of Justice Building opened featuring murals painted by George that incorporated Francis' image in the "Life of the Law" mural. George Biddle was married three times: • Anne ("Nancy") Coleman (b. 1896), married from 1917 to 1921 • Jane Belo (November 3, 1904 – April 3, 1968) an anthropologist from Dallas, Texas, to whom he was married from 1925 to 1929 • Hélène Sardeau (July 7, 1899 Antwerp (Belgium) – 1969) a sculptor, to whom he was married from 1930 until her death. • Michael John Biddle (b. November 15, 1934). George Biddle died on November 6, 1973, in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.

• Illustrations for Porgy and Bess libretto (1930). Commissioned by George and Ira Gershwin. • Portrait of Helene Sardeau, the Artist's Wife (1931), Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. • Self-Portrait (1933), Philadelphia Museum of Art. • Murals for Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building (1936), Washington, D.C. • La Guerra y la Paz (War and Peace) for Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (1940), Mexico City, Mexico. • Portrait of Man Ray (1941), Philadelphia Museum of Art. • Portrait of Frieda Lawrence (1941), Philadelphia Museum of Art. • Murals for National Library of Brazil (1942), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.